Birthday Giveaway

Sewjourn is having a birthday giveaway, be quick it ends at 5pm tonight.

I have just downloaded my September copy of WOW, great inspiration there and well worth the miserly subscription. I am about to incorporate Julie Smith’s wonderful article on making a mermaid’s purse (or cuff actually) into my sea angels. I have just about finished all the machine stitching and will spend the next two weeks with the hand stitching.

Here is another taster.

 The first is the twin needle stitching on the neck of one dupion silk gown:This is the other gown painted with a mixture of acrylic, opulence ink and dyn na flow then sprinkled with salt:

I painted some pearl cotton with the leftovers but they are a bit stiff, even after being in the dryer. They might be okay in a twisted cord or couched on. This is in the wet stage, it actually dried much lighter and will be toned down with overlays.

The last photo is another of the wing pieces. On the corners I have stitched using the Maggie’s technique from the Perth workshop. I’m hoping these will look like fragments of fishing net once dissolved.

Sorry about the flash off the glass cooktop.

Cheers

ATC/Postcard swap complete

Just a quick post of the swaps we recently sent, now they have been received in Canberra and North Devon.

For Ebony from Claudia (Doreen emailed this scan for me, thanks Doreen)

Ebony made this gorgeous ATC for Claudia:

And for Val;

Val sent the most beautiful postcard and ATC for me and an ATC for Claudia shown here.

The theme for the swap was spring, and I had a piece of fabric on which I had originally painted four roses (for a spring swap last year with Susan!)

This is the one I worked on for Val as it fitted the postcard size best. It has some pink fibres and some leaf shapes from the scrap bits of painted fabric covered with chiffon scarf and FME’d. It is finished with hand stitching and beading.

I still have the other two roses and am trying to decide whether to cut into ATC size for the Creative fibre arts group swap, or keep them whole and finish as quilties. These two have fragments of silk paper added, then FME over a chiffon scarf (I have a great collection of these scarves from the Op shop).

Progress on the casalguido:

 

I think the casalguido stitch is ideal for the tree, great texture. The thread for the stem stitch over the top is cotton a broder, between a pearl 8 and 12 in thickness. Hopefully I’ll finish this off today and add some needlewoven leaves. 

My sampler is a bit haphazard, unlike Sharon’s fantastic examples!!

I’m hoping to try out some of the needlewoven stitches from Effie’s book (which I have borrowed from the library, but like so much I’ve ordered it from Boomerang Books) in the space next to the tree.

Cheers

Off to stitch!

Slow and Steady

…..wins the race.

I love the idea of slow cloth, takes the pressure off completely and makes the whole process so much more enjoyable (as long as it doesn’t degenerate into procrastination). It’s all in the mindset, I find. If you look at the process of mulling over the possibilities in a positive way it becomes a constructive thing to do. Of course there is still an important place for the frenetic when inspiration comes pouring out, because work that is totally spontaneous can have fantastic results.

Most of my current projects are of the ’slow’ variety.

I am still working on my ’sea angels’ and finding many possibilities opening up as ideas are sparked from viewing lots of creative blogs.

I am also still working on my ‘killed catalogues’, a new idea for which was sparked off by Heather’s fantastic chessmen.

Here are a couple of great ATC’s we have swapped.

On the left is Gillian’s first try at ATC’s, very interesting textures, and on the right the amazingly talented Ebony’s sent to Claudia.

Claudia’s return ATC to Ebony, which should have arrived by now (which I can’t find a photo of, whoops) was part of this random felting she did at our March textile group. Claudia used her ATC window to choose the sections she wanted to cut out. She chose some colours of machine embroidery rayon and had fun FME’ing the circles and outlines. I always make sure Claudia puts on the safety glasses for this stage in case she breaks a needle. She also chose one to finish and send off to Val (forgot to scan that one too!!)

Here are a few more of Claudia’s in production.

I have been also slowly continuing with the Stitch Explorer for April and May. April was Casalguido embroidery and May was needleweaving. These two are complementary styles of stitching so I decided to combine them for this sampler.

The first stage, casalguido or padded raised stem band stitch, shows stranded cotton laid down, couched with sewing thread and then satin stitched with more stranded cotton. The perpendicular stitches are then placed in the second photo and I will try some cotton a broder to cover this with the final layer, stem stitch.

The base is four sided stitch using two strands of DMC. I will be doing some needlewoven autumn leaves in a hand dyed variegated pearl  bought from Sharon to finish off.

I found Effie Mitrofanis’ book a wonderful guide to this stitch, with clear directions and some inspiring contemporary embroidery.

I have also ordered Effie’s needleweaving book from the library as well, so I’m sure that will also contain some more great ideas and instructions.

Time to get off the computer and finish the housework, so I can sit and stitch!!

Cheers

Fabricate 09

Today Pauleen and I made the trek up the Melbourne/Geelong Rd to the opening of the Fabricate 09 exhibition by the TAG (Textile Art @ the Guild) group.

There was a wonderfully diverse range of textile art by invited artists from Australia and internationally, including art dolls, indigo dyeing, felting, weaving, free machine embroidery and printing. The exhibition is beautifully hung, with the ‘luminous’ indigo dyed panels of Rowland Ricketts 111 dividing the space.

The photos below are taken from the catalogue, designed to allow them to be used as postcards, with funds from the sale supporting the TAG group activities (there are more photos on the TAG site).

All art pieces at the exhibition are for sale as well as the patterns for Jennifer Gould’s exquisite dolls. Well worth a visit.

Cheers

Show and Tell

I have quite a bit to show and tell as I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks.

Firstly we received some amazing swaps from Val in the mail. Val sent the heart ATC for Claudia, which of course she absolutely loved. The postcard and ATC were for a swap we arranged on the theme of ‘Spring’. The postcard’s colours are just glorious, and she has used Beryl Tayler’s fabric paper techniques. My favourite, however is the ATC entitled mossy bark which has the most beautifully layered effect. Thank you so much Val, the returns will be winging their way over shortly.

Our last creative arts meeting in March was inspiring once again with all the beautiful pieces on display. Unfortunately I forgot the camera, but there are a few bits and pieces on the group blog.

Some of the group, with others from the guild, attended a Machine embroidery workshop with Fibre artist extraordinaire, Jan Preston on a very warm Saturday. The title of the workshop, ‘Free stitch with Nature’, was very apt. We had to take along some snippets from the garden, which we enclosed in solvy and free motion embroidered over. Jan had some beautiful skeleton leaves she had found in the Otways which she generously allowed us to use. It was a great, fun workshop and such a pleasure to spend the whole day stitching without interruption.

These are some leaves I stitched over and also a rose hip:

This next one was a dried agapantha flower head that I stomped flat and stitched and some bamboo wool that I stitched over as well:

I finally finished the triangular book I started weeks ago for Maggie Grey’s on-line workshops for her book, Textile translations.

The outside has stars torn from paper casting over a corrugated meat tray and some heated tyvek motifs. The colour is mostly from radiant rains and moonshadow mists sprayed over. The inside has some marbled paper pages stamped with ‘reach for the stars, feet on the ground’.

Our final challenge is to convert ‘killed’ catalogues into art. Maggie has the details on her blog if anyone wants to join in. Here is my catalogue (actually oldest daughter’s Cosmopolitan magazine), newly unearthed from the mulch under the rose bushes. Some people have had trouble with husbands and dogs trying to steal their catalogues away; my husband was quite happy to keep the mulch topped up over it and the rose thorns kept the dog away!!  I have sprayed it with vinegar to disinfect and will start playing once it is dry (might have to brush a bit more dirt off).

Cheers

 

Progress on WIP

Firstly some beautiful post received, from Britt in Perth

Claudia was mega excited when she opened the envelope and saw all the cute extras Britt had included. Britt offered a huge range of ATC’s on her blog for swap, each featuring her beautiful, fine tatting lace.

Also received were these amazing ATC embroideries from Anne in France and Emmy in Netherlands. I do not have the patience for such fine embroidery so I’m in awe of both of these super talented ladies. If you want to get a surprise for the return ATC’s don’t look any further girls!

 

It is a great feeling to actually finish something. I have had a number of projects on the go at the same time which sometimes makes it difficult to feel you are progressing. Having a long weekend this weekend and staying home instead of gadding about has made a huge difference. I have managed to finish or make obvious progress on a number of fronts. The biggest task was finishing off the ethics application for my research project. Emailing that away on Sunday was a huge lift off the shoulders. It meant that on Monday I could relax and enjoy some arting with Claudia. Firstly here are the ATC’s we finished for our swaps.

Claudia decided she would like to draw some pictures to stitch on to hers, so they have been scanned and printed onto ready to print cotton sheet. For the base fabric she layered some silk fibres under the green chiffon fabric (left over from my Mum’s cardi) and FME. I gave her my sample from a machine embroidery workshop and she chose to do a star pattern. The hearts are the ones Britt sent to Claudia.

My ATC’s were made as a strip of seven and are based on one of my favourite paintings by Grace Cossington Smith called Landscape at Pentecost . I used some techniques from Angie Hughes new book Stitch, Cloth, Paper and Paint. Bits of curtain fabric, scrunched tissue paper, silk threads and muslin were adhered to pelmet vilene with vlieofix. Then all the bits were secured with FME zigzag with white polyester cotton thread. The details were added with some cable stitch using no. 8 perle cotton in the bobbin. A coat of gesso was added all over and left to dry overnight. This morning I painted over using koh-i-noor watercolours mixed with white pearl lumiere. A tiny bit of handstitching finished them off.

Claudia also wanted to paint so she painted some cotton sheeting with nice, bright stripes to use as the backing for her ATC’s. The Stitch Explorer stitch for February is the Trellis Stitch, a great stitch for 3D effects. I have tried out a couple of motifs on my sampler based on the links Sharon gave us. The circular motif is in perle 8 and includes a few beads threaded on by hand. The diamond is stitched on a base of reverse chain stitch and I worked each side separately decreasing to form a triangle shape on each.

This weekend progress has also been made on trying out a few techniques for the ’sea angels’. While painting fabric I tried out a few different colours and paints on some dupion silk and will use this as a sampler to try out stitches for the sea angels gowns. It scanned really badly so I won’t bother loading that picture.

This week is the new stitches and craft show at Melbourne Showgrounds. As I have to go up to uni on Thursday I might try to pop in for a few hours and check it out. If you’re free check out the web-site, it looks like a mega show with something for everyone.

Cheers

Jimmy Rocks Torquay

I had a fantastic time last night singing and dancing along to Jimmy Barnes. Jimmy  and his band, which included his two daughters on back up vocals and his son on drums, were singing at the Torquay pub beer garden and we were squashed in like sardines. I went along with some girlfriends and one of my D1’s friends and it was great to see all the older Cold Chisel fans had brought their kids (18-20 year olds as you have to be over 18 to get into the pub) along and they were rockin’ too.

I have managed to catch up on a few outstanding p/cards and ATC’s. These will be sent off tomorrow with New Year greetings.

And here is a close up of one

Although they started with the same base, each one is slightly different. I decided to try out a few different colours and threads for the finishing edges. To add an Australian flavour I FME’d gum leaves onto organza to attach and collected some seed pods and she-oak seed capsules on my morning walk.

While my SIL was visiting from US she bought some sock wool and was knitting socks for the return back to the snow and freezing weather. Claudia was fascinated with the sock wool and how the stripes appeared so of course she ended up with a pair as well.

To thank my generous SIL I made her a bracelet with some freshwater pearls and a beautiful stone someone had given me.

I had a lovely email today from Kim in the US who had seen my comment on Susan Lenz’s Cyberfyber site. Kim is visiting Australia and New Zealand in January and asked for some tips on places to see in Melbourne or Sydney. I put together an email with lots of links to places of interest in Melbourne, so if anyone else would like it just let me know. Also there is voting for the reader’s choice Postcard and ATC awards on CyberFyber so if you have time drop over, have a browse and leave some comments. There are some truly wonderful pieces of art on display, very inspiring.

Cheers, till next time.

I’m Back and the Mighty Geelong Cats march on

The Australian Rules footy finals have begun this weekend, and this year we naturally expect the Cats to go all the way again, so much so that my husband’s road trip with the boys has been planned so he returns in time for the Grand Final. There is a ballot for Grand Final tickets, which annoys many Geelong Footy club members who feel they should be guaranteed a ticket. We will put our two memberships in the draw and see how we go. Out of 30,000 members, the club is allocated about 12-13,000 tickets so there will be quite a few disappointed people around.

It is such a pleasure to type on the new imac, I’m loving it. I have set up the automatic backup, and it has heaps more oomph and memory than the laptop.

I will use this post to catch up on all the posts I’ve missed while having severe computer problems.

I’ve started knitting two scarves, one just an ordinary straight one, the other a cool pattern I found on Kitty, which has some fantastic free patterns. Although spring is sprung and today was a beautiful day, I am not fooled, we will still have some chilly weather ahead.

 

This post is going to take the format of Jackie French’s wonderful shortlisted Children’s Book Council Award book, The Shaggy Gully Times. Her book is based on a weekly country newspaper where the stories are written throughout the week until the published date. it contains some very funny word puns which the children I’m teaching find extremely amusing.

One week later and, the Cats have won their first final convincingly, they have a weekend off followed by the prelim next weekend. We have put our tickets in the ballot, so hopefully the cats will win and be into the Grand Final on ‘the last Saturday in September’.

A little bit later: have just been to the airport and waved daughter no. 1 off to Malaysia for her school trip (Year 12 Indonesian), her first trip overseas. I don’t know who was more excited, her or me, but I did put an order in for some batik fabric and perfume.

A final picture from the FME workshop with Mandy Ginsberg of the Victorian Embroiderer’s Guild. After some exercises and experimenting, we made little felt badges. This one is for Claudia to wear to Junior Embroidery Group.

Cheerio

Busy, Busy again

We were preparing to go to an 18th birthday lunch. Firstly I made a batch of Irish Cream which the birthday girl loves, and can now drink legally (although it should be called Scottish cream as I put Scottish whiskey into it). Email if you would like the recipe! Claudia decided she’d like to make a postcard as a birthday card so she selected a piece of painted fabric and we stamped with pink and purple, cut out a fairy and FME with gold thread. While this was going on I was making a bracelet with some silver chain, a gorgeous bead and some charms to decorate the neck of the bottle (but didn’t have time to take photos as sons 1 & 2 woke up and decided they wanted to be dropped at friends). Party was at 12noon so it was all a little last minute. In the meantime daughter no. 1 made the salad. Made it to the party only 5 minutes late. Phew.

Last Sunday/Monday I attended the Embroiderer’s Guild conference, which is held every five years (not two as I previously thought). As well as embroiderers from all over Victoria, there were girls (and one boy) from Perth, Tasmania, and New South Wales. Most of the participants were living in for the whole four days, however as the conference was in Geelong, I was able to go home each night. My two day workshop was with Kirry Toose from Sydney who makes the most innovative wearable art and was such a fantastically friendly, enthusiastic tutor. Our workshop was making a Victorian capelet. Kirry brought some beautiful work to show us and allowed us to photograph also. However I didn’t think to ask if I could put it on my blog so I’ll just show one which we all admired very much.

This cape has the most amazing hand stitchery all over. Mine was nothing like this. I decided to go an Art Deco design based on the braid I had bought (see last post). Kirry had another piece of work in her portfolio based on circles as a focal point, which we used to create the design for my cape. After a quick dash to Spotlight and a visit to the thread shop in the bedroom (one of the Melbourne ladies had brought ‘a few’ items from her shop), this is what I managed to finish in the two days. Hopefully I will get this finished over the next few weeks.

This is the back

And the fronts

It is the dupion silk, backed with whisperweft, which we washed first in hot water to reduce shrinkage, and then the design is traced onto vliesofix. The design is cut out and then I ironed on the organza. Tear away is used while the applique edging is sewn and the FME. My machine and hand embroidery will be minimal in line with Art Deco design. I still have to finish the sleeves as for the fronts and back, do a little beading, attach the braid to the collar and FME and decide on and construct the fringe.
Cheers

Postal Excitement

Claudia was extremely excited to receive more ATC’s in the post yesterday, from Doreen and Ebony in Canberra. This truly is a great way to encourage young textile artists of the future. Thankyou Doreen and Ebony, Claudia absolutely loves them.

Claudia is keeping all her trades in a small photo album (pink being the favourite colour of the moment).

Susan has received her ‘garden’ postcard so I can post it here.

After painting the base fabric I fused some silk paper and purple op shop scarf

then FME’d over the top. I then hand beaded, couched some bumpy fibres and added the little butterfly charm.
I have finished the journal cover (1am Friday morning) but forgot to photograph before handing in my assessment Friday morning. I’ll have to wait until it comes back marked. I was a little disappointed in the fitting of the cover. I didn’t allow for shrinkage from the FME and had to trim the journal to fit (luckily it was just cardboard and plastic and easily cut). I also made a small tassel and machined cord to dangle from the spine.

I also began knitting a scarf (it’s getting colder here now although August is our coldest month). All the local retirees are packing up and heading north to the warmer states, we have a quite a few years to go before we can do that. (WordPress has obviously decided I have my quota of photos on this post and refuses to load anymore).
Next Thursday we have our textile group get together and are supposed to show our progress on the boxes we are making. Hmmm, I have a cardboard template so that is the task for tonight – make some progress. We are also going to dabble in fabric and paper bead making so that will be fun.
Cheers